As the Apostle John puts it so simply, but so profoundly in three words, God is love. But we need to immediately recognize a challenge or a difficulty at this point. Talking about love is not so straightforward or easy.

To see what makes God's heart merciful, we're not just looking at actions that we would describe as mercy, like forgiveness. We're asking at a deeper level: what emotions, what movements, what dispositions give rise to a merciful heart in the first place?

If we were to reconcile Jesus' love with his anger, well, then a number of other questions arise for us: what good does looking at his angry heart do for you? Does gazing at God's angry heart instruct, guide, or heal us? How does his angry heart heal and reshape our own?

God's heart or the person of God is filled with mercy and compassion deep down. This is his deep disposition. He is merciful. He is compassionate. Comfort is when that deep disposition is moved towards a specific object, one of his children, and it's moved in such a way that it acts in order to comfort.

As Christians, we believe that our faith is far more than a set of ideas. We believe it is a heart connection, that it has this effective center where our hearts come into contact with the eternal and the glorious heart of God. We also believe as people living through this current season that our hearts can grow weary and cold, and it is only under this great heart that they are finally renewed and reshaped. So our heart connected to his, that's what we're after.

The past year has been hard on our hearts. At least this is what I see when I talk to many of you and when I think about myself. And so I want us to take some time as we close the season Epiphany in the next two or three weeks and as we moved through the season of lent, I want us to take some time to work on our hearts. The main way we will approach this is by putting our hearts before God's heart.